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Nicole “Bonnie Thunders” Williams and Danielle “OMG WTF” Flowers work behind the counter at Five Stride Skate Shop, the Brooklyn store they co-own. (photo: Sara Morrison)

Six days a week, Nicole Williams, 28, and Danielle Flowers, 32, ride their bikes from the apartment they share to Brooklyn’s Five Stride Skate Shop, the business they co-own. Here, they are best known to their customers by different names and for their activities on a different set of wheels: roller skates. As Bonnie Thunders and OMG WTF, respectively, Williams and Flowers are two of the best skaters in the Gotham Girls Roller Derby league, and Five Stride specializes in selling to roller derby players like them.

Two days after Flowers and her team, the Brooklyn Bombshells, won the season championships over Williams’ team, the Bronx Gridlock, Flowers still smiles about the victory, though that grin is a bit lopsided — the left side of her jaw is still bruised, the result of an opponent’s errant elbow. Her happiness does not escape Williams’ notice:

“You just have the biggest grin on your face over there!” Williams says.

“Hey, it’s like the one time! This is the first time we ever beat them, ever!” Flowers calls back from behind the register.

Williams thinks for a minute. “Yes, it is, actually. That’s true. Damn! That makes it even harder!”

Though the women are opponents in intra-league play, they play together on Gotham’s All-Star travel team, which recently won the national championships. Since Five Stride’s May 2010 opening, they’re teammates in business as well. Five Stride sells skates and equipment to a specific customer type: fellow roller derby players, who Williams estimates make up 75% of their business (the remaining 25%, she says, are recreational). Derby skaters spend anywhere from a few hundred to over a thousand dollars to fully outfit themselves with skate boots, wheels, toe-stops, safety gear, even shoelaces that have been specially tailored to the type of skating they do, and Five Stride’s narrow floor space has it all. Helmets adorn the walls on one side; shelves packed with model skates are on the other. The market they serve is a niche one, but, Williams feels, that niche is big enough to sustain a brick-and-mortar shop like theirs. So far, so good; in just a year and a half in business, Five Stride has already had to expand once to its current, larger Williamsburg location.

Williams, left, and Flowers, right, hang out on Five Stride’s couch with Tank, the store’s sleepy pug mascot. (photo: Sara Morrison)

Five Stride is far from the only derby-focused business out there. Across the country, both physical and online-only businesses – most founded and run by skaters – have sprung up to cater to skaters’ needs. One, based in Los Angeles, designs and makes roller derby uniforms. Another company in Lacey, Wash., makes skate wheels and pads. Huntington Beach, Calif.’s Wicked Skatewear sells derby apparel – from practice gear with personalized skater names and numbers to derby-themed jewelry to a small selection of skate equipment.

Co-owned by Suzy “Strychnine” Dancisin and Bethany “B-train” Semeiks, Wicked was formed in 2009 while Semeiks was studying for her MBA at University of California Irvine, which she earned in 2010. Semeiks, who started skating in 2006, realized the need for her business after she tried to buy derby clothes from places like Hot Topic; she found them to be ill-fitting and not up to the rigors of the sport. “We wanted to be the place that rollergirls could go to and trust to find stuff that fit them.” Wicked recently opened a second branch in Los Angeles, and Semeiks says roller derby “definitely has been trending up,” pointing out that junior and men’s leagues are also popping up across the country.

Williams notes that the growth of junior leagues should feed more skaters into adult leagues: “It’s still growing and there’s still enough skaters around and new skaters coming in.” But she knows that nothing is guaranteed: “Certainly, if roller derby just ceased to exist tomorrow, then that would probably put us out of business.”

It’s not an unsubstantiated fear. Roller derby has been full of ups and downs since it was invented by Leo Seltzer in 1935. Seltzer, then 32, held the master lease on the Chicago Coliseum (now demolished). Looking for programming during a lull, he capitalized on the popularity of roller skating and walkathons by putting them together, hoping to fill seats at his arena. About 20,000 people attended the first-ever roller derby. In the ensuing years, the endurance “walkathon” aspect of the sport was replaced with timed periods of play and plenty of contact – some real, and some staged.

By the late 40s, roller derby was being shown on the relatively new television networks, but bounced around from CBS to DuMont to finally ABC, which aired two or three games a week until 1951, according to Seltzer’s son Jerry, who took over promoting his father’s league in 1958. The younger Seltzer’s reign covered the “golden age” of roller derby most associated with the sport; at its height it played to thousands at Madison Square Garden and was broadcast on more than 100 television stations across the country.

By 1973, Seltzer’s league consisted of six co-ed teams with 14 skaters each, who were paid as full-time professionals. But the league, Seltzer says, was “always under-financed,” and competition with new professional leagues hoping to cash in on its success saturated the market. The 1973 gas crisis was the final nail in the coffin, Seltzer says: “So many people couldn’t get to the games. The arenas just shut down because they couldn’t heat them.” The end of that year was the end of the league. “We went broke,” he says; “Frankly, I thought that was the end of it.”

It wasn’t. In 2001, a small group of women in Austin, Texas, decided to bring the sport back. Lacking the money to build a large wooden banked track, they held fundraising exhibition bouts on a flat track, and a new version of roller derby was born, consisting of amateur leagues that skate on an oval track marked on the floor. (A handful of leagues have been able to build and maintain banked tracks.) Players adopted clever pseudonyms, and while initial bouts featured the exaggerated hits and staged fights of Seltzer’s day, it soon became the legitimate contact sport it is today.

The grassroots development of the amateur sport is hard to track. Juliana Gonzales, executive director of the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association, the only thing close to a governing body the sport has, says modern derby has grown from about 35 leagues of 40 to 50 skaters each in 2005 to today’s estimate of 400 to 500 leagues worldwide. Derbyroster.com puts that number at 1,105, with six continents represented. WFTDA was formed in 2004 to help promote and develop the sport as it gained traction, and today it is responsible for the rules set most leagues play by and the nationwide tournaments that effectively determine the best league in the country.

As Bonnie Thunders, Williams breaks through the pack. Williams is the captain of the Gotham Girls’ All-Star team, which recently won the 2011 WFTDA Championship. (photo: Sara Morrison)

Gonzales, who skates for the Texas Rollergirls as “Bloody Mary,” is hesitant to say whether the newest incarnation of roller derby is sustainable enough to survive. She is optimistic, though, noting “really big growth internationally,” especially in Europe and Australia.

Seltzer believes that this version of derby won’t suffer the same fate as the league he oversaw. “The way it died before was, there was one group controlling all of roller derby. Very frankly, if the Derby Dolls (a Los Angeles league) died tomorrow, it’s not going to affect Minneapolis.”

Yet at least one sports business analyst remains unconvinced about roller derby’s prospects. Scott Rosner, Practice Assistant Professor at the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of The Business of Sports said in an email: “Roller derby may be sustainable as a very small business that allows a handful of stakeholders to generate some income while it is resurgent, but to think that it can become anything more than that on a long-term basis blinks reality.”

For now, Williams is confident that her business will endure, and that roller derby – and roller skating – will continue to be popular enough to sustain it. Moreover, she says, her expertise will keep customers coming back. As long as there’s still a game to play, Five Stride’s owners believe they’ll have no trouble helping customers who want to get better. And so far, Williams’ luck – in business and in derby — has held up. “I’ve never broken any bones,” she says, knocking on her store’s wood-paneled wall.

OMG WTF and Bonnie Thunders embrace after being named MVPs of their teams following OMG’s team’s league championship title win. (photo: Sara Morrison)